Sustainability

Mass production is inseparable from mass purchasing – a process maintained by the marketing of desire, complemented by the credit that subtracts deferment, lest we cease to play our essential part in the process by claiming – subversively – to be replete.

Thus until now has our world revolved. Many have been the diagnoses. The unintended consequences of industrialization were recognised even as it sprung from the inspiration of its inventors. It was in England, including Birmingham - cradle of industrialization - that the arts and crafts movement emerged at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Many have been the nostrums that would allow us to keep the benefits of our inventive genius without the aloes of dispiriting wage labour on production line, call centre, warehouse, depot or in the field - agriculture, aided by enclosure, being one of the earliest sectors to be mechanised. Initially the making and selling of material commodities had been the focus of this process - the all enveloping process by which humans would make even dreams into commodities. Was there ever such a conundrum as the mass marketing of ‘individuality’? How do you attach the flavour of uniqueness to a product that’s made in millions by machines; persuade the world to buy something that makes them feel exclusive, though never, in their making, touched by craftsmen - except to make the original jigs? How do you lie without being untruthful?

I recall being fascinated with the ingenious way advertisers' wordsmiths and image smelters invented ways to square this circle – so it that it seemed to make sense. One device was the oxymoron. “Free gift”. The other thing was to use long words which impressed people who didn’t understand them at first, like ‘synthetic’ for ‘fake’ - the strangeness of the word, not the euphemism, was what counted; or saying things in the customer’s face - 'added sud-booster!' in detergents because, although quite unnecessary, consumers didn’t trust a liquid that didn’t behave like soap; or ‘home-cooked’ to describe cake-mix bought off the shelf, with the reassuring slogan 'you add the sugar!'; or the seductive juxtaposition of a slogan and an image –a couple in soft focus beside an azure sea – to sell a holiday. 'Enjoy paradise together'. No lies told about the serried loungers of those similarly persuaded; indeed a kind of truth. The consumer does the rest, selecting the dream from the reality, taking home snaps and memories that omit and select. My step-father spoke of the sale of dreams many years ago, before he entered television, and was working first for Coleman Prentice and Varley, where he met my mother, and was head-hunted to Hobson Bates, giants of the advertising industry in the 1950s. He was impressed by the Esso campaign - which over-50s will still remember so effective was it - to 'Put a tiger in your tank'. Accompanying that slogan were a number of 'giveaways' at petrol stations; stickers for drivers to display in their cars – 'I’ve got a tiger in my tank' - as well as wiggly tiger tails to tie on their aerials. “It’s a breakthrough” he told me “the first time the industry's got the punter to do their advertising for them!”

Years later when our children would balk at us buying them clothing without logos, usually trainers, T-shirts - not least because they were far cheaper - I’d say

“Look. How about asking the shopkeeper to pay you for displaying all that advertising”. By then Naomi Klein, and many others, Vance Packard most famously, had explained how this worked, but knowing makes no difference. We are all, even when we understand how it works, caught up in the process. Some people’s dreams – their room 101 of desire – takes a little longer to figure; requires a shrewder hustle.

When change comes – irresistible and inevitable change – those who can exploit it are those who have thought through, or sense intuitively, what they want despite the great persuasion that drives consumerism. These may be individuals, they may be families, villages, communities and indeed populations who might somehow escape the galloping crescendo.

What do you want from your life, your job, your community? What aspects of these things do you really want to maintain through the changes that are coming, are indeed happening now? Because so many of us live so unself-consciously, consumerism intervenes on the back of a sales campaign to seduce us, hustling our desires, telling us what we want, tapping into motives salesfolk understand better than most of us know ourselves.

The greatest obstacle to unending consumerism is self-knowledge separate from those inserted in us by the promoters of our hopes and fears. The spectre of sustainability is anathema to consumer society, since it's a philosophy, even a faith, able, unargued, to pervade our every action and thought - the idea that humans only need so much, that there can be sufficiency, satiation. That may sound simple. It isn’t. Sustainability is still a frail idea, assailed from every quarter by those who perceive it as impossible, impractical, subversive, sentimental, idealistic, toxic to all they hold dear. Yet sustainability, because so many people do find it a sound and desirable idea, is the prime target of the agents of consumerism. Everything that is unsustainable – carbon based energy, mass tourism, urban expansion planned obsolescence, population growth for a start – can be sold as sustainable when it is not.
[10 Nov 2010 - Ed Gillespie, Co-founder of Futerra, develops the argument on sustainability]

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A 1998 review: This study looks at the problem of collectively managing shared resources. Because of the book's unassuming nature and rather formal scholarly tone, it's easy to pass it over as just another academic work. But together with such books as Herman Daly and John Cobb's For the Common Good, Paul Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce and Vandana Shiva's work on restoring the commons, I consider it one of the more far-sighted and genuinely significant works to emerge in recent years on environmental resource management.

Ostrom uses the term "common pool resources" to denote natural resources used by many individuals in common, such as fisheries, groundwater basins, and irrigation systems. Such resources have long been subject to overexploitation and misuse by individuals acting in their own best interests. Conventional solutions typically involve either centralized governmental regulation or privatization of the resource. But, according to Ostrom, there is a third approach to resolving the problem of the commons: the design of durable cooperative institutions that are organized and governed by the resource users themselves.

"The central question in this study," she writes, "is how a group of principals who are in an interdependent situation can organize and govern themselves to obtain continuing joint benefits when all face temptations to free-ride, shirk, or otherwise act opportunistically."....

Back to the future: February 2011: Changing the way we eat conference in Manhattan

Connection and convergence

When Corfu was a bastion of the empire of Venice

We visited the new fort in Corfu town, ascending gently via Solomou Street, €3 entry, then up a steeper path, then steps until up a narrow iron stairway a vista of Corfu’s rooftops, domes and upper floors and down to the ports over to the Old Fort; uncluttered with educational signage so you make things up as you stroll through the defensive tunnels and tour the battlements, getting slightly lost down dim cul-de-sacs, imagine falling through holes, bones found years later. Venetians built this fort four centuries ago. Italian was the language of government, long before Greece became a nation and longer still before the Ionian Islands became part of Independent Greece. They called their bastion Castlll Novo to help guard a front line opposite the western sea border of an immense declining Ottoman Empire which continued 200 miles north to Belgrade on the borders of the Austrian Empire, north eastward past Bucharest almost to Odessa in Russia, a greater part of the Black sea coast, eastward to the Indian Ocean, south over Syria, Sinai, Egypt across all north Africa to the Atlantic. When the Ionian Islands joined independent Greece in 1864, Epirus easily visible across the narrows was still Turkish - just. Corfu was a northern outpost. The borders of independent Greece lay further south, on a line from northern Euboea, through Lamia to the west coast opposite Levkas – 60 miles south of Corfu. The Turks ceded Thessaly to Greece in 1881 and then after the Balkan Wars of 1913 Greece extended its northern borders to where they now remain, but for the addition of Thrace in 1923.
Later we strolled briefly up the narrowest part of Theotoki where transients from unsightly stacks of floating flats squeeze by shops offering wisecrack T-shirts bringing commerce to the city.
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On Sunday we went to Paxos on the hydrofoil – like travelling inside a windowed vacuum cleaner with an old engine, What the journey loses in romance it makes up for in speed across an azure sea with splendid views over the parched mainland coast topped by cumulo-nimbus thousands of metres high. I sat on a rock paddling a foot in the sea by the southern harbour mouth at Gaios reading Kadare’s retelling through the tortuous investigations of Regional Captain Stres of the legend of Doruntine and Konstandin, her brother, who may or may not have risen from the earth to bring his sister home from a marriage in distant Bohemia to visit her aged mother, Lady Vranaj, in the emergent land of Arbëria, vaguer in boundary than modern Albania, more robust in culture.

Gaios in Paxos

Most arrivals I find disappointing. Is this age? Am I jaundiced by experience of travel? What has happened is the disenchantment of place, making everywhere too familiar, all that is charming and exotic seems commodified, taken over by voyeurs, customers, spenders. We arrive as economic drivers; consumers of place; the harvest of areas which once had economies based on trade other than the sale of themselves. I've been spoiled. I've entered harbours - for me - yet unseen - Naples, Syracuse, Bonifacio, Bizerta, Casablanca, Mousehole, Marseilles, Gibraltar, Algerciras, St.Peter Port, St.Malo, Piraeus, New York, Bridgetown in Barbados, Fort-de-France in Martinique, Le Havre, Cowes, Lymington, Beaulieu, Grimsby and Goole, Ortiguera, Espasante, Dartmouth, Cherbourg, Gosport, Cuxhaven, Southampton, Gran Canaria, Bequia, Calvi, Port D'Andraix in Majorca, Ibiza, Zante, Killini, Patras - sailed the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, the North Sea and the Channel, the Bahamas from Matthew Town to Nassau.

Θὰ μπαίνεις σὲ λιμένας πρωτοειδωμένους·
Νὰ σταματήσεις σ' ἐμπορεῖα Φοινικικά,
Καὶ τὲς καλὲς πραγμάτειες ν' ἀποκτήσεις,
σεντέφια καὶ κοράλλια, κεχριμπάρια κ' ἔβενους,
καὰ ἠδονικά μυρωδικὰ κάθε λογῆς,

…you will enter harbours yet unseen;
that you may stop at Phoenician emporia,
and acquire all the fine wares,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensuous perfumes of every kind…

We are no longer strangers to be offered hospitality, but here to pay people’s wage. On the way to and from - between departure and arrival - I still nurse fantasies of travel; imagining and exploring places with a life of their own and economies that don’t need my money, which offer me the opportunity ‘to learn and learn from lettered men’- ‘νὰ μάθεις καὶ να μάθεις ὰπ' τοὺς σπουδασμένους.’
I enjoyed the little Paxos museum; an official junk shop – though I didn’t put such a description in the visitor’s book – because it would be misunderstood and hurt feelings.

Here amid the homogeneity of seasonal tourism was a classroom filled with a disordered display of domestic tools and backbreaking agricultural artifacts that people must have handed into the museum from time to time mixed with old black and white portraits, children’s innocent toys, a crib, keys, flat irons, a child’s commode, a pump flyspray, a donkey saddle, a celluloid doll, a bakelite telephone, a short handled bed warming pan, a four poster bed, a Pierrot suit, a Singer treddle sewing machine, a loom, lace bobbins, cotton pyjamas, nighties, globves, veneered wood case valve wirelesses, builder’s tiling tools, a display box of hundreds of small flint tools including arrow heads but as likely used for myriad domestic tasks in the absence of iron, heads, guns, knives, dressing table items, shells, pots, pans, cutlery, clocks, texts, samplers, bedcovers, a heart-stoppingly simple tapestry of aspirations to conjugal happiness from an unmodern world of faith and material poverty, foxed mirrors that made so much sense of seeing truth through a glass darkly, and in a separate room some very good oil portraits and small landscapes by the island artist Christodoulos Aronis some of whose paintings are in St Sophia’s Church in London – where my stepmother Maria’s (Μαρία Ρουσσέν) funeral service was held.

Yet I should realize that one of the duties of being grown up, old, even wise, is to stop my displays of vexed disappointment at expecting to be entranced by other people and places. I was taken to places whose magic I now grumble at missing by parents, teachers, tutors, wiser companions and many others who wove the clothes of my imagination, artists who embroidered my dreams for me. I should be doing that for myself from the rough cloth of days.

On the horizon a smudge a little higher to the east than to the west, due south in the gap between Levkas to the east and Cephalonia to the west. Fifty miles away. Ithaca.
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The web amplifies serendipity. I’ve had an intriguing letter out of the blue:

Dear Mr. Baddeley. A friend of mine, at the University of Hertfordshire  just successfully discovered your exchange with Karuna Mantena who had sent me her dissertation on Sir Henry Sumner Maine since I have written about him in my book on Common lands and Customary Law and institutional change in north India published by Oxford University Press, 1996. I knew George Feaver very well who as you know wrote Sir Henry's biography  ... and felt the lack of some of the known sources known to exist in the family's archives to which I had 'lost the trail' so to say. You cannot imagine my excitement, or perhaps you can for I have been living with the research on his papers since 1978. Is it possible for me to meet you sometime as I am in England right now and will be making a presentation at Hallam University on the 17th of this month? Best wishes and look forward to hearing from you. Prof. Minoti Chakravarty-Kaul

I replied saying that the person Minoti should meet, while we’re in Greece, was my mother who as a child knew Lady Maine, her great grandmother Jane, who died many years after her husband. Minoti has since written to my mum and copied her letter to me:

Dear Mrs Burnett-Stuart. Greetings from an Indian scholar and teacher retired from a women's college called Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi, India. I would be honoured and grateful if you could grant me some time to meet up with you, if possible on the 18th or 19th of September at your home. Please forgive my precipitate request, it is occasioned because only the other day I 'discovered', to my extreme gratification, both Simon Baddeley and you Mrs Burnett-Stuart as Sir Henry's descendants. I crave your pardon for springing this so suddenly because, I will be heading home to India on October the first, but somehow I cannot give up the idea of meeting you…I will be in the north as close as it can get to where you live now. Please let me know if it will be convenient for you to see me…I first came across Sir Henry James Sumner Maine's work way back in 1978 as a result of research following a disturbance over the Government acquisition of common lands in a village called Kanjhawala to the North West of Delhi State, the capital of Imperial and then national India since 1911. This incident in 1978 suddenly drew my attention to the fact that even though I was teaching economic history of Europe where enclosure of common lands was central, we in India had not paid any heed to common lands as a heritage of rural India.

Thus, began my journey into the past and when I tried to trace the origins of property rights in land in India from the records that the British administration had left behind, I came across the theories of Sir Henry James Sumner Maine and so this endeavour has been a continuum for me over thirty years now.

Even though so much has been written about Sir Henry's work…no one has really examined what he had to offer in terms of common lands and the village community in either England or in India. This is despite Sir Henry's work on Village Communities of the East and West.

The only exception perhaps has been Lord Everseley and the emergence of the Open Spaces Society and now the Foundation of Common Lands in the UK and Ireland.…A large part of the reason for this historical 'miss' has been that histories have concentrated on the manor and manorial courts which had land records without giving due importance to folk law and the institutions of self-governing capacities of rural communities which were largely unwritten.

In my reckoning and those of our association of like-minded scholars as (in)...the International Association for Common Property [IASCP] deem that common property in natural resources and traditions of commoning are very important institutions for the twenty first century. The development of governance in countries which are newly emerging from a past are annihilating micro-governance systems which were relevant to both communities and their use of natural resources. With climate change in the offing the urgency of this connection becomes even more critical. I hope this introduction has not been tedious but I am only trying to convey to you why Sir Henry's work has been so crucial to my research. As you well know Ancient Law, 1861 had already established that the origins of Law can be traced to India. My take from this has been in my work on Common Lands and Customary Law in Northern India, 1996. Currently I am working on a book or rather two each of which will complement the other - one will be Sir Henry Sumner Maine and the European Debate in the Nineteenth Century and an annotated compendium of his correspondence … (but) my major involvement is at the ground level where village communities of sedentary cultivators and pastoral communities have been struggling against markets and Governments, to keep their foothold on what is an inheritance from the past - common property resources. (my italics - SB) I hope you will consider me deserving of a little slice of history and grant me the privilege of meeting you? Yours truly with regards, Minoti.

I have of course been interested and proud of my great great grandfather’s reputation but saw no connection between his genius and anything in which I was marginally involved. I rejoice at the quite unexpected prospect, sparked by Karuna Mantegna’s scholarship, of making a small connection between Minoti’s life work, my step-father’s long preoccupation with documenting on television the end of country life and the dissolution of men’s link with the land, a preoccupation of his biographer Paul Peacock, of our friend Mark in Ano Korakiana, and my own shared efforts to recover urban green space especially our local campaign to save the Victoria Jubilee Allotments - me an urban pooter who’s seeking news of his first potatoes on his first allotment. I am sure my mother already fascinated by these continuities – she who as well as working for Vogue as a war correspondent was long on the editorial staff of Farmer’s Weekly at a time when farming was going through tectonic change  - will be delighted to meet Minoti. I shall hope to stay in touch and will now be learning more about the Foundation for Common Lands in UK and Ireland, and the International Association for Common Property and its association with Nobel winner Elinor Ostrom (her 2009 Nobel Prize speech text and video). Let the plot develop. I have also not forgotten that my dad was born in India, where his father served in the governorate of Madras (Mumbai) and where his mother, my never known grandmother Dorothy, died in the 1930s. Talking among my Greek relatives there was even a fantasy that due to a hushed up affair long ago we may even have Indian blood – something that would in that society in those days something to be hushed up by all involved would now be a source of pride. Dad who never had the opportunity to reconnect with India would speak of love for his childhood haunt, a love which he transferred generously and unconditionally to Greece by marriage and the gift of my half-siblings. And then there’s my newer connection and the joint work in Australia with John Martin, Professor of Sustainable Regional Communities in Bendigo (and an even keener cyclist than I). Is this blending really the egoism of age, with all roads converging on my significance. Yes and no. I’m allowed, like Pooter to disclaim false modesty and I do feel drawn into a plot in which my walk-on parts are becoming more frequent.

Ref: 19 October 2010 - The International Association for the Study of the Commons
Note: Get a copy of Ronald J. Oakerson's Governing Local Public Economies: Creating the Civic Metropolis 

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Back to the future - 25/12/11 - Jim Potts links to a short tale about 'one less octopus in Paxos'

Over the centre of Australia

Around 2.40 local time we flew over Ayres Rock, Uluru its Aboriginal name. At the same time I was reading of Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize for economics. She's author of Governing the Commons, and John's copy of a short speech by John Bryden at the 2009 CRRF/FCCR Conference on The Idea of Local Development: Some transitional observations and research implications. (link not available, but see another of Bryden's lectures)

An email to Handsworth friends:

Dear Rachel and others. Hi from Australia – where I’m teaching. I took 6 of my Japanese students to visit the Walsall Road Allotments the other day courtesy of their secretary Betty. They are doing a fantastic job there, led by Betty, who is quite an exceptional person. I understand the city allows WRA to be self-managed, and self-managed they are. A positive haven of social activities around the core function of growing food and flowers.

John Bryden's talk

It pulled me up hard against the scale of the task that will face those finally arriving – we hope in early 2010 – to work plots on the new Victoria Jubilee Allotments. The city allotments section has been drastically cut back. The Birmingham Mail mention 65%. They’ve lost Eddie Campbell.So while I’m aware of the personal and social potential of a thriving allotments site next to Handsworth Park I’m also thinking of the work involved trying to imitate a site like Walsall Road or Uplands.By the way if you peer through the railings in the park at the right place you will see that the gardeners’ meeting shed has been delivered and seems to be in place. Apparently one of the bid delays at present is that the education department of the city is not ready to take delivery of the new cricket pitch in its current state. They’re wanting to delay hand over until the point where they have no immediate demands on budget to make the S106A green space 'fit for purpose'. Best wishes and I’m back Nov 28. Simon (Australia, Oct 24-Nov 28)

* * * There's a rumour that talented Penny Woolcock's film 1Day about the Johnson Crew and Burger Bar Boys, largely shot - yeah yeah - in Handsworth, has been banned from some Birmingham cinemas. Seems unlikely, unless publicists engineered attention to what looks like a blacksploitation film despite earnest assurances from Woolcock - a talent who's Macbeth on the Estate in Ladywood I really liked. She's been roaming Handsworth for a few years; suspect at first, then breaking through via a connection with Dylan Duffus, who'd been pointed in her direction by Vanley Burke: “The film shows" she says "how people get sucked into that life and it clearly spells out the consequences, which is people end up dead or in prison. The film absolutely does not glamorise that lifestyle. It has a clear moral message.” ... like Romeo and Juliet doesn't glamorise romance because they both die after being sucked into a passionate affair against their parents' wishes.

I may fret at the disingenuousness of Woolcock's disclaimer, especially after long and repeated campaigns in Handsworth against gun crime, but some local boys and girls have got a deserved break into show business and can thank Penny and their talent for that (Steel Pulse - my first intro to local talent long ago). Perhaps the 1Day cast will come back into schools, riding bicycles even, to pitch impressionable children away from guns and drugs.

I was reminded about getting too worked up when I read in Tim Winton's Breath - my imagination's first and recent introduction to something I'll never do - though I've acquaintance with the deep - a reason for being happy to live in Birmingham, as far as anyone in England can live from the sea (Winton: 'I was in my thirties before I learnt that I too would prefer not to see what I could no longer have'). Instead of reckless surfing, Winton's characters could have been doing the sorts of things 'that schools and governments sanctioned ... as army cadets, learning to fire mortars and machine-guns, to lay booby traps and to kill strangers in hand-to-hand combat like other boys we knew ...' (p.106)